Sure a manuscript is an unpublished primary source, or an ancient book only held in 12 libraries. However if that item is published that does not create a secondary source. And if that item includes interviews with other people, that does not make it a secondary source. A primary source is merely the first time a given situation is made to exist.  Even if King Yog took notes before his interview with me, and had them typed up and collated by someone else and then read them to me, and I copied them out and published them, I'm not creating a teritary source out of all that. Everything that comes before primary is merely part of the process of creating a source.  Just because there are levels and layers of information doesn't push the source into being secondary or teritiary. The notes are primary, the typed version is primary, the manuscript is primary, and the final published version is all still primary.  I think I wrote a monograph on this a while ago when someone asked me if a school transcript is a secondary source (it's not) their reasoning was that it's built from various "primary sources" which are the grading worksheets from various teachers. However my reasoning is that all of the preparation is merely the necessary steps to create the source. It's instructive to consider whether making images available online of a primary source creates a secondary source.  How about making minor editing corrections?  At what level of modification of a primary source, do you create a secondary source?  Formatting a film for TV size doesn't suddenly turn the film from primary to secondary. W.J. -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Turvey <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tue, Aug 25, 2009 11:16 am Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Secondary sources Are we talking at cross purposes here? "Primary sources", "secondary sources" and "tertiary sources" are phrases that are regularly used by historians and other academics whose use considerable pre-date Wikipedia. Unpublished primary sources are regularly used in academic research. ----- WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote: Ireland, Portugal instance primary witness Typically first-hand is sources _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I disagree that editing turns a primary source into a secondary source. And I disagree that we make that distinction in-project. I also disagree that newspaper articles are secondary sources. Some are, some aren't. Is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle a primary source? Yes.  Do you believe that every event there described is being described by an eye-witness? No.  In fact it's possibly doubtful whether any of it is eye-witness testimony.  Being an eye-witness is not what makes an article primary or secondary. -----Original Message----- From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tue, Aug 25, 2009 3:42 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Secondary sources Wikipedia is not the same as the academic world.  From the point of view of an historian analyzing sources, a newspaper is considered a primary source, and you will find them so classified in any manual on doing research in history or any listing of sources at the end of an historical book or article.   From the POV of Wikipedia, we've been considering it a secondary source, which is the way most people think of it. what we call primary sources: is the archival material that an historian also calls primary sources, but normally lists separately in a bibliography.   if the reporter's notebooks are preserved, that's also a primary source. The analysis of the differences between the primary sources20in attempting to reconstruct what happened is what historians do. The articles & monographs other historians  publish giving their analysis is what they consider the secondary sources. Similarly, in science, the actual archival primary sources are, in a sense, the lab notebooks--and they are preserved as such, for patents and the like. But a primary scientific paper is the one reporting  the work, and a secondary paper is a review. The Wikipedia definition is a term of art at Wikipedia, used because we need some way of differentiating between material which is edited, and that which is not. The primary sources are the unedited reports. As a newspaper is edited, its a secondary source. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 6:30 PM, <wjhonson(a)aol.com> wrote: =0 A> think  sources" and "tertiary sources" are dia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l